e-edukacja w kraju - E-mentor

Virtuous Circles, Vicious Circles and Virtual BooksVirtuous and Vicious Circles of PublishingInformation, our stock in trade as academics, isa “public good”. It is non-rival: the consumption ofinformation by one individual does not reduce theamount of information available for consumption byothers. Currently, given virtually universal access tothe Internet, it is also de facto non-excludible: no onecan be effectively prevented from consuming it.Public goods are a well-known problem for market-basedsystems. The story is familiar: withoutincentives these goods will not be produced and thatis, as economist John Quiggin notes, the rationalefor copyright: Copyright matters because it provides aneconomic incentive for authors to create socially valuablecontent in circumstances where, if they weren’t given thisincentive, they would do something else. The copyrightsystem is necessary to encourage the creation and use ofsocially valuable content or so goes the standard utilitarianjustification for copyright 19 .According to the standard story, without the incentivescopyright provides for producers and vendorsof intellectual property, consumers would have lessaccess to creative works than they would if there wereno restrictions on access because there would be lessintellectual property produced. When the marketworks, copyright and other restrictions on access tointellectual property produce a net gain in access toinformation.But sometimes the market does not work and thevirtuous circle turns vicious. To see this consider “oneof those counterfactuals”. As a thought experiment,imagine a worst-case scenario at a possible worldwhere there are no textbook anthologies:You have emerged from grad school without everhaving taken an ethics course and at your first job youare asked to teach “Contemporary Moral Issues” 20 .What to do? You google around and pull up a dozenor so syllabi for Contemporary Moral Issues classesthat are being taught by colleagues at respectableuniversities. You note that there is a shortlist of topicsthey all do as well as some extras. You quickly learnthe basic format for an applied ethics course and startputting together your syllabus using a colleague’ssyllabus as a model. You set up the structure of topics.(Let’s see: some general stuff about utilitarianismand other theories with readings from Rawls, Nozickand Peter Singer; then abortion, euthanasia, theenvironment and so on–gotta use that Judith JarvisThompson article on abortion; maybe some extras,like copyright). Then you plug in the readings. Youinclude the “classic” articles that appear on all syllabiand check out the others that are conveniently linked,picking what you like.You are a free rider! (You just learnt that term).You’ve gotten the selection and structure for an appliedethics course, which your colleague toiled tocreate, for free!But is this a bad thing? It’s no skin off of yourcolleague’s nose if you tweak and use his syllabus:the selection of readings and structure of his courseis a public good–using them doesn’t use them upor in any way detract from their value to him or hisstudents. Of course with lots of free riders like youaround, he can’t sell that reading list: that’s whythere aren’t any applied ethics anthologies at thispossible world. But even without that incentive, hewill still create and improve his syllabi because he’sgot a course to teach, and will still put them up at hisclass websites for his students’ convenience and hisown. Widespread free-riding does not diminish theincentives for producing syllabi: it only eliminates theincentives for publishing them in the form of textbookanthologies. In general, as Quiggin points out, “thecopyright system does not provide incentives to authorsto create valuable content so much as it providesincentives to the intermediaries who guarantee thecirculation of this content” 21 .With access to the Internet, and a wide rangeof syllabi and readings available online, you don’tneed those intermediaries and, indeed, you andyour students are better off without them. Puttingtogether your course in this way means building onthe expertise and experience of colleagues, tweakingand improving their materials, and learning, which issurely conducive to good teaching. In fact everyoneis better off: putting syllabi up at a website and linkingreadings is much easier, less expensive and lesstime-consuming than assembling and publishinga textbook; accessing readings online is cheaper andmore convenient for students than buying a text bookand hauling it around. As for the “intermediaries”,instead of wasting their time trying to compete withthe Internet by bloating textbooks, they are more responsiveto consumer preferences and produce moreaffordable materials 22 .If this is correct then the restrictions on accessto information that create a demand for textbookanthologies are counterproductive. They are costlyand do not create any additional incentives for producinginformation. They perpetuate a vicious circlein which academics do unnecessary menial works andpublishers have no incentive to improve the efficiencyof their operations.19J. Quiggin, D. Hunter, Money Ruins Everything, „Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal” (forthcoming),available at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1126088, [02.02.2009].20It happened to me.21Quiggin and Hunter, op. cit.22Affordability is a significant concern at community colleges and other institutions that cater for economicallydisadvantaged students. See, e.g. http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/29/textbooks and http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/16/textbooks, [02.02.2009].luty 2009 101